I am not deaf.

I do not hear words as I read. (As I write I do)

There are a variety of reading styles, some involve recognizing whole words at a time, others involve sounding out words.

I'm also a whole word reader, it is IMHO generally faster than needing to mentally hear words.

I just tried that. Not sure I like the feeling, seems to rob of the pleasure of reading. But it -is- an interesting effect. Do you get pleasure from it?

It is how I learned to read, early on I could read lots of words I had no idea how to pronounce.

Makes reading sci-fi with funky alien names much easier! :D

It’s dominant but not universal. My daughters and I do this but my wife doesn’t. She can’t even imagine what it’s like.

I read without hearing the words. If I'm tired, however, sometimes I need to start reading out loud to keep concentrated.

Also, non phonetic writing systems will push you towards not hearing while reading. For example, when I read chinese there are plenty of characters (hanzi) whose pronunciation I don't know (was it hai? Pai?), but I remember the meaning just fine.

Even with English (I'm not a native speaker) sometimes I won't remember how to pronounce a certain word, but I'll read it just fine.

> Also, non phonetic writing systems will push you towards not hearing while reading. For example, when I read chinese there are plenty of characters (hanzi) whose pronunciation I don't know (was it hai? Pai?), but I remember the meaning just fine.

Makes sense. I also tried an earlier suggestion to (effectively speed) read and that seems to send constant interrupts to the speech center -- which is how I am beginning to imagine how it works -- and it struggles to keep up and very soon becomes silent. atm still prefer my apparently pedestrian reading mode as it has a strong 'pleasure of reading' aspect that as of now I do not get when attempting whole word parsing.

How do you experience the pleasure of reading? For me, the reconstructed voice of the author and in general the (for the lack of a better word) musical aesthetics of the 'text' are significant.

Curious: What's your favorite piece of poetry?

It's funny that you mention poetry. With poetry I do like to feel the sound of words.

I very much like Emily Dickinson, why? (What's your favorite piece of poetry?)